Majority of the houses on the street are well kept but in the last 6 months, the area is very active with crime. 

When you have a real estate license, all of your real estate activities fall under the supervision of your brokerage.

Both of my kids are big into sports and I also enjoy playing sports.

Connect with active investors and visit there projects if possible.  

I speculate, that in my market, the tenants enlisting realtors are actively looking for a home (unlikely to renew) and want to get there roots down in the town while they shop.- another animal of course if you enlist a realtor...

You'll need to separate your assets (either by using a Series-LLC or individual LLC with assessed distribution of assets by LLC) and you'll need to separate your passive (asset holding entities) from active operations (the property management side).After you took care of all this you can look into other more complicated/expensive strategies like you describe (equity stripping).Here is a diagram to help you on this quest - talk with @Scott Smith for professional advice on this:

Does anyone know any brokers there or can name some of the more active company's.

Maybe someone will act on it and buy, This kind of activity keeps the price up and makes it easier for local investors to sell to OOS entities. 

The lawyer I reached out to got more active after the New Year.

Just a year ago all kinds of real estate folks were pleading for more active listings and saying prices can't continue to climb like this.